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Overview

Ethel Sara Wolper is a cultural historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic world. She earned her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, where she designed a program on public policy and the arts. After completing her M.A., she spent a year at the American University in Cairo studying advanced Arabic and a summer at Bosphorus University in Istanbul in an intensive Turkish program before earning a Ph.D. in Islamic Art from the University of California in Los Angeles. At UNH, Wolper teaches courses on the history of Islam and the Middle East, Sufism, Islam in America, and Islamic art. Wolper has held fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the American Association of University Women, the Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery of Art, and the Mellon Foundation at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She has also interned and led tours for the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago. At UNH, she served as director of the UNH in London program. Wolper is the author of Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (Penn State University Press,2003), and has published articles in Muqarnas, Mesegios, Muslim World, and Medieval Encounters. She has contributed chapters and entries to The Art Museum (Phaidon, 2010), Women in Islamic Culture, and the Readers Guide to Gay and Lesbian Studies. Wolper's current research focuses on the history of conversion in the medieval Islamic world.